Social mobility in Venezuela: ups and downs.

One of the characteristics of the Hugo Chavez Venezuelan regime is social mobility. Usually this is a positive social phenomenon and makes us think of the person of modest origins who can become, through merit and hard work, an important member of society. The story of Lincoln, born in a log cabin and becoming president of the United States, easily comes to mind. In the Venezuela of the recent past the story of Alberto Quiros (left) was a source of inspiration for many young employees of the oil industry. He started out as a field hand, carrying pipe, and ended his career as president of the most important oil companies in the country and as a respected petroleum manager and a public figure.
Social mobility, in this context, is a welcome sign of an open and democratic society where intellectual credentials (as in Quiros’case) or extraordinary personal skills (as in a major league baseball player) are more important than inherited money or name.
Social mobility under Chavez is something else. To start with it is not always up but often down. And when is up, is not necessarily due to personal credentials or intellectual capacity but to unconditional loyalty or friendship with the powerful.
Take the case of Nicolas Maduro, the Venezuelan Foreign Minister. Maduro (right) is one of the most powerful members of the Chavez regime. He is constantly next to Chavez while his lady, Cilia Flores, is the president of the National Assembly, where she has or had (until publicly accused of nepotism) about 15 members of her family in the payroll. Maduro has a lot of influence in Venezuelan life only because of his nearness to the dictator.
Jut before he became Foreign Minister Nicolas Maduro was a…Metro bus driver. Not the best of the lot, mind you, but a mediocre bus driver with a poor record for punctuality at work. I have nothing against bus drivers as human beings, although a Caracas bus driver is usually, and as a matter of necessity, a pretty aggressive fellow who cannot afford to possess a florid language. I think it most unlikely that a Caracas bus driver could suddenly morph into a successful chief diplomat. In the case of Maduro his great leap forward has been possible due to Chavez’s decision, which is always final, and to the fact that the Venezuelan foreign minister’s main task is to carry Chavez’s briefcase (that often contains nothing since he has all he needs in his head or in his pockets). Maduro has proven up to the task of being Chavez’s minister. His language is a cosmetic version of the one he used in Caracas streets when the driver next to him tried to pass him: “Are you crazy, you son of a whore? “.
Maduro is the showcase of the revolution, as far as social mobility is concerned, but is not the only one. Carlos Lanz, a Minister of Basic Industries in Chavez’s regime, was a famous kidnapper and thief before he was promoted into the cabinet. Freddy Bernal, a former mayor of Caracas and enthusiastic Chavez follower, led a gang of urban robbers and appeared in the red pages of the newspapers before he became a political notable. The same can be said of a lady who reached very high positions in the Chavez government. The Finance Minister, Ali Rodriguez was an explosives expert and terrorist in the 1960’s although he later became a lawyer and is now a “bright” spot in Chavez’s cabinet. In general, Chavez has surrounded himself with a bunch of unsavory characters who have been chosen to do tasks that are way above their heads. The result is that very little, if anything, has been done. Venezuelans still travel in roads built by the last dictator in the 1950’s or by democratic governments in the 1960’s and 1970’s. No new hospitals have been built during the Chavez’s regime and state schools and universities are in a sorry state of repairs. Electrical blackouts are increasing by leaps and bounds due to lack of investment while the dictator has spent close to $7 billion in weapons that are being used against citizens (soldiers armed with Kalashnikov rifles bought from Russia rob civilians, see my story in http://www.lasarmasdecoronel.blogspot.com/). Social expenditure, a source of political propaganda for Chavez, is almost exclusively based on handouts and cash transfers to the poor, the classic fish a day, but not the teaching of fishing. This policy of handouts actually deepens dependence in the paternalistic dictatorship. Dictators do not create self-starting citizens but keep the masses ignorant and in need of the daily handout in order to consolidate political power.
As social mobility upwards is based on false credentials, social mobility downwards has become a tragedy. The Venezuelan middle class is a species in danger of extinction. Chavez’s drive to include the poor, conceptually correct, has been incorrectly executed by sowing class hatred and excluding the professional, traditionally hard-working middle class. One of the results has been a significant reversal of the wonderful European immigration that took place during the 1950’s and 1960’s and which helped Venezuela to become a country in the threshold of the first world. Today thousands of the off springs of these men and women are going back to Italy, Portugal, Spain, to the countries their parents came from, looking for freedom and civilization they can no longer find in Venezuela. More than 300,000 Venezuelans live in Florida and work in jobs below their qualifications. Lawyers drive taxis, dentists sell real state but they have felt compelled to leave a country that no longer looks like the one they grew up in. Thousands of petroleum managers and technicians now work in the Middle East, in Colombia, in Peru or Canada, wherever there is oil and they are not discriminated against.
Social mobility based on education and hard work was one of the gifts of the Venezuelan way of life for natives and foreigners alike during the second half of the 20th century. Today, under Chavez, this gift has been lost, either temporarily or permanently. This constitutes a deep and painful wound on our Venezuelan soul.